App Development: Tailoring Your Message for the CFO and CEO

When it comes to app development, each of us have our own role. We know what our goals are, but sometimes we don’t have a clear strategy to communicate that to others on the team. What’s important to the developer might not be important to finance, and what’s important to the finance team might not be important to the administrative folks.

What we recommend you do is tailor your message to your audience. While it’s obviously important to communicate development goals to the team, each executive is going to have different expectations for the project’s success.

Your marketing lead is going to want to hear about the app’s features and why they’re so important to the customer. The CFO is going to be interested in numbers. The CEO is interested in how the company’s app increases productivity, lowers costs, and produces revenue.

Accelerance’s outsourcing gurus Steve Mezak and Tom Cooper add that communicating goals in an outsourcing environment is even more difficult. “It's a challenge for the outsourcing company or leader of the outsourced team to be communicating at that level,” Steve says. “You definitely need someone in the middle to be the translator, so to speak, and the communicator it seems to me.”

In outsourcing, you need a solid communication plan as assuming you’ll communicate on an as-needed basis is not sufficient. Schedule frequent and regular meetings to ensure everyone’s on the same page. You have bosses and others to answer to and without good news to pass along, you could find yourself without the help when you need it.

“I think you've got to be intentional about who you're going to be communicating with, what exactly they need, how they are being rewarded, what they are measuring based on the software progress, and how they can put this in terms that really resonate for their audience,” Tom argues.